Review: '30 Rock' - 'Florida': Strange bedfellows

A review of last night's "30 Rock" coming up just as soon as I shake a jar of coins while praising Jimmy Carter...

"Florida" wasn't necessarily one of the strongest episodes of this victory lap season of "30 Rock," in that I think there was probably an entire episode's worth of material in both stories, and having to split time made both feel only partially baked. Tracy and Jenna running the show is too fruitful to be largely relegated to a montage, and the payoff to Liz's desire to be impulsive felt rushed.

Yet despite that, the episode was packed with so many great throwaway jokes that I could just spend this review listing them all. (Just a few favorites: the Florida 911 voicemail tree, Jack acknowledging that he slept with Jenna a lot in season 3(*), and Bev explaining that her mother died in the middle of naming her.) And I also appreciate how, bit by bit, Tina Fey and company are using this season not only to go out on a funny note, but to resolve various character issues that have percolated throughout the series.

(*) At first, I thought season 3 was the one where Jenna put on all the weight from starring in "Mystic Pizza" on Broadway, but it turned out that it was season 2. Season 3 was, in fact, a very Jack-and-Jenna heavy season, as they were working together to make "Jackie Jormp-Jomp," though Jack was also busy dating Salma Hayek. (Also, the show has by and large treated the age of "TGS" and "30 Rock" as the same — Tracy was added to the cast very early in the run of "The Girlie Show" — so you can view that as a meta line or not, if you so choose.)

So we finally got an episode that came right out and addressed why Jack and Liz never hooked up, with Jack standing in for the "30 Rock" writers by explaining that their friendship was "more interesting than some dating scenario... To ruin what we have with some tawdry yet expert sexual encounter would have been a mistake." It's something that's been so clear that it didn't necessarily have to be underlined, but it worked because the sequence of them sharing a bed wasn't about whether they would finally have sex, but about Jack being in denial about his mother's relationship with Martha. (Alec Baldwin's delivery of "And I know those pots aren't flowers; they're my mother's vagina!" was sublime.)

Similarly, we know that Kenneth has always been the victim of everyone else on "TGS" (when you're taking abuse from Lutz, there is no further to fall), but it was good to see him finally stand up for himself — and for that act, of course, to lead to the end of "TGS." The show-within-the-show has survived almost entirely on Kenneth's eager willingness to humiliate himself for the sake of his TV friends, so the moment he places himself above others, the show's doomed.

Now that we're into January and there are only two weeks of the show left (a regular episode next week, and an hour-long finale on the 31st), it's finally sinking in how close we are to this being over — and how unhappy I'm going to be when "30 Rock" is out of my life.

Alan Sepinwall has been reviewing television since the mid-'90s, first for Tony Soprano's hometown paper, The Star-Ledger, and now for HitFix. His new book, "The Revolution Was Televised," about the last 15 years of TV drama, is for sale at Amazon. He can be reached at sepinwall@hitfix.com

It's amazing just how good this show is and just how much we're all going to miss, especially when you consider that the show ran out of energy in a major way in season 3 and by the end of season 4 even fans were begging for it to be put out of its misery. The way in which Fey et. al. have revitalized the show and made it just as funny (and twice as warm) as it was at its peak is nothing short of inspiring.

While watching the Golden Globes I realized how many guest stars 30 Rock had over its seven years. It's really insane if you think about it, it felt like the whole room once guest starred on this show.

You were right about all the great one liners. I know I'm butchering the exact quote, but I loved the montage of all of Kenneth's abuse being followed up by him saying "Now as for the days that weren't my birthday..."

I'm calling it now: having already been locked into the brother-sister adoption, Liz discovers that they're not blood siblings - the girl is a blonde diva obsessed with her looks and random bouts of singing, and the boy is a black kid with a wildly inflated ego and has no idea how anything really works